Article 51A(f) of the Indian Constitution recognises what many politicians and anthropologists still fail to do: India does not represent a civilisational whole¹ but has a "composite culture".² That this statement does not merely reflect the wishful thinking of the constituent assembly but historical fact is no more evident than in the continued presence of the ancient traditions of Buddhism and Jainism in India,³ which contemporary religious nationalists have for decades unsuccessfully tried to incorporate into the indefinable 'Hindu' mould; not to speak of the presence of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and diverse tribal communities. This article tries to demonstrate through the analysis of the unique conversion ritual of the Akram Vijñān Mārg, a new religious movement in the Gujarātī-speaking world, that the supposition of a civilisational unity of India or of South Asia is a theoretical abstraction which obstructs rather than illuminates the understanding of the cultural and religious history of the Indian subcontinent. Heterogeneity and processes of bricolage, mixture, syncretism or hybridisation are not merely the consequence of external cultural interaction, migration and travel, that is the advance or retreat of a well-defined cultural frontier,⁴ but situated at the very heart of religious and cultural life beyond the homogenising cultural politics of the state⁵ and organised religion.⁶ The article is based on intermittent fieldwork between 1997-2004 in Amadāvād/Ahmedabad, London, Mumbaī/Bombay, Surat, and Vaḍodarā/Baroda.

The Akram Vijñān Movement

The Akram Vijñān Mārg, or the Stepless Path to Soteriological Knowledge, has currently approximately 300,000 followers amongst the Gujarātī-speaking diaspora in India, East Africa, Great Britain, Fiji and the U.S.A. The movement was started in 1962 in Baroda by the religious visionary Ambalāl Mūljībhāī Paṭel (7.11.1908 - 2.1.1988), a businessman with only basic formal education who belonged to a Vaiṣṇava Pāṭidār family from Tarsālī, a suburb of Baroda. He spent most of his life as a married householder without children in Bombay where he worked as a contractor for the company Paṭel & Co. which specialised in the construction and maintenance of the dry docks in the harbour. In 1958, while waiting for a train at the railway station of Surat, he had reportedly a forty-eight minutes long 'enlightenment' experience. It is said that he was able to contact Sīmandhara Svāmī, the Jain tīrthaṅkara who presently lives on the mythical continent of Mahāvideha,⁷ and due to Sīmandhar's grace (kṛpā) was able to achieve the state of permanent self-realisation, or ātmajñāna.⁸ Suddenly, he understood the solution to all spiritual conundrums: "God is your real self";⁹ "All you need to know is to understand your real nature".¹⁰ He understood at once that through this insight he had gained jīvanamukti, or liberation in this life, since he was from now on able to directly experience the difference between the inner 'real self', which he later called Dādā Bhagavān, Grandfather Lord, and the outer 'relative self', that is A. M. Paṭel, and his actions which appeared to be nothing but karman accumulated in previous lives that come to fruition (karmaphala), without any involvement of the real self.

From 1962 onwards, A. M. Paṭel, the jñānī, or knower, taught his insights, first to family members and friends and later, on popular demand, in public meetings (satsaṅga) to anyone who was interested. He used the ontological categories of the Sāṁkhya tradition to describe the disjunction between pure consciousness (puruṣa) and the activities of the body-mind complex (prakṛti) which a self-realised being merely observes from the outside without identifying with them. However, most of the recognisable cosmological, soteriological and ritual concepts of his idiosyncratic teachings (which were only orally transmitted and via tape recordings) ¹¹ stem from the Jain tradition. Like Sāṁkhya ontology, Jaina ontology is dualistic. It distinguishes between soul (jīva), or pure consciousness, and non-soul (ajīva), or matter, but characterises pure consciousness not as a passive but as an active force. In addition to right knowledge Jainism stresses the soteriological importance of non-violent action, because the karmic bondage of the soul is perceived to be real, not just an illusion based on ignorance.

The principal text of classical Jainism, Ācārya Umāsvāti/Umāsvāmī's 5^th century Tattvārtha Sūtra, propagates a threefold path to liberation: through right vision, right knowledge, and right conduct.¹² According to this view, salvation can only be achieved if non-violent conduct is informed by the knowledge and the belief in seven fundamental truths (tattva), which describe the mechanism of karmic bondage and the traditional path of liberation through the stepwise purification of the soul.¹³ The combination of the three aspects of the path of liberation is still regarded as the essential feature of what later came to be known as jaina dharma, the doctrine of the Jinas, or victors, i.e. the twenty-four fordmakers (tīrthaṅkara) which showed the way out of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth.¹⁴ However, in practice, many Jain traditions have stressed one aspect more than others. As a consequence, contemporary Jainism presents at least three different Jain paths to salvation:¹⁵ asceticism (canonical and classical monastic Jainism), devotion (classical lay Jainism),¹⁶ and knowledge (Digambara mysticism). I have suggested elsewhere¹⁷ that the Akram Vijñān Mārg is the only religious movement which has developed the anti-ascetic implications of Kundakunda's Digambara mysticism, with its emphasis on self-realisation and salvific knowledge, into a Mahāyāna-style alternative to the classical path of purification. The emphasis on knowledge and devotion certainly proved to be of interest for many lay Gujarātīs, because it offers the option of a stepless (akrama) or instant 'enlightenment' (vijñāna) for everyone 'through the grace of Dādā Bhagavān', that is the self-realised soul of A. M. Paṭel.

The movement,¹⁸ which crystallised around A. M. Paṭel from 1962 onwards, cannot be easily located within any pre-existing religious tradition, although it clearly draws upon ritual and doctrinal elements of Vaiṣṇavism and Jainism whose classical conception of siddhaloka, the realm of the liberated souls, serves as the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey. It is argued here that the process of formation of this new religious movement is typical for many similar movements, probably since time eternal, by not being a product of cultural diffusion through travel or conquest, but a creative synthesis of elements that are cumulatively selected from the universe of known ideas and practices under conditions of positive feedback.¹⁹ The resulting syncretism is difficult to classify, because the Akram Vijñān movement explicitly rejects the conventional attributes 'religion', 'sect', 'cult', 'movement', 'scripture', 'doctrine', 'ritual', 'guru' and 'disciple', which it regards as worldly and particularistic. It favours a universal 'non-sectarian' path (mārga) to salvation through introspection and the mystical experience of individual self-realisation which is beyond words and not accessible through the intellect. This direct experience of the transcendental truth - which provides a shortcut to salvation²⁰ and marks the end of conventional religion - is offered to the followers of all religions, including Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, etc. This article analyses the method which A. M. Paṭel, the Dādā Bhagavān, invented to transmit his self-knowledge directly and unconditionally to all interested aspirants.

Worldwide Mission

Although A. M. Paṭel rejected organised forms of religion, he invented a ritual technique for the 'transmission' of his experience of self-realisation to others. This unique procedure was called jñān vidhi, or the rite of knowledge, and became the focus of a new organised 'guru-cult' which spread quickly throughout the Gujarātī-speaking world, especially amongst urban working class and lower middle class professionals with limited formal education from Vaiṣṇava and Jain families.²¹ In 1973, A. M. Paṭel gave his blessings to the creation of a community organisation, the Jay Sacchidānand Saṅgh in Mumbaī, for the financial and organisational support of his missionary tours in India and abroad, and for publishing and construction projects. The first leader of this nation-wide organisation was the head of the Dādā Bhagavān Vītarāga Trust in Bombay, Khetsī Narsī Śāh, who after his death was succeeded by G. A. Śāh from Ahmedabad. Important local Sacchidānand Saṅghas in India are located in Vaḍodarā, Surat, Amadāvād and Mumbaī. Amongst the Gujarātīs in East Africa, including several relatives of A. M. Paṭel, the community of Kampala (Uganda) has the greatest number of followers. In 1982, A. M. Paṭel was invited for the first time to the U.S.A. by the family of Vasant Paṭel in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the U.S. community leader, and returned to the U.S.A. every year until his death in Baroda on the 2.1.1988, which was mourned, amongst others, by more than 10,000 U.S. Gujarātīs.²² The number of followers has continuously increased ever since.

Schism And Continuity

In the last decade of his life A. M. Paṭel became almost a full-time preacher, due to popular demand. Until 1978, when he had an accident which left him with a fractured leg, A. M. Paṭel and his wife lived together with the family of Kanubhāī Paṭel (born 1930), a structural engineer who worked for his company and who became his most dedicated follower. However, from 1978 onwards he severed his business connections with Kanubhāī and concentrated entirely on his religious work. He was accompanied on all his missionary tours by the medical doctor Nīrubahen Amīn (born 1944) from Auraṅgābād, the widowed daughter of one of his earliest devotees, from the Carotar Paṭel jñātī of the village Vaso in Gujarāt, and herself a devoted follower who committed herself entirely to his service (sevā).

After the death of A. M. Paṭel in 1988 a succession dispute flared up between Kanubhāī Paṭel and Nīrubahen Amīn, which in 1993 - the year in which the first of three Tri-Mandira shrines of the Akram Vijñān movement dedicated to Sīmandhara Svāmī, Kṛṣṇa and Śiva was completed in Surat²³ - led to the split of the movement into two factions. At present, the oldest community organisation, the Jay Saccidānand Saṅgh, still supports Kanubhāī Paṭel, but the majority of the believers follow Nīrubahen Amīn. The ongoing dispute between the factions focuses on the charismatic qualification of Nīrubahen Amīn, the person which was closest to A. M. Paṭel during the last decade of his life, to act as a religious leader. Nīrubahen Amīn claims that, in 1987, A. M. Paṭel (who publicly did not determine any successor since he rejected organised religion) had given her a secret mantra which allows her to temporarily invoke the spiritual power (siddhi) of the Dādā within herself and to act as a medium for the performance of the rite of knowledge, the principal focus of the Akram Vijñān movement, after his death.²⁴ Kanubhāī Paṭel, on the other hand, points out that he was the person closest to A. M. Paṭel before 1978 and received from him the powers to perform the jñān vidhi already in 1960. His followers preserved a clandestine tape recording of a private conversation between A. M. Paṭel and Nīrubahen Amīn on the 19.9.1987 which seems to prove that he wanted Nīrubahen to work together with Kanubhāī and to assist him in the performance of the jñān vidhi. In contrast to Nīrubahen Amīn who does not claim to be enlightened herself but acts merely as a spirit medium (nimitta) of A. M. Paṭel, who in her view was the only jñānī of this age, Kanubhāī Paṭel asserts that he is a jñānī in his own right, and the only presently existing enlightened being/man (pravartamān pragaṭ jñānī puruṣ).²⁵ One of the main objections of the Jay Saccidānand Saṅgh to Nīrubahen's succession is that she is a woman.²⁶

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